Negotiating health and identity: Peruvian villagers' discourses on the uneasy co-existence of primary health care and indigenous medicine

Global health care models in developing countries urge integration of indigenous medicine with Primary Health Care (PHC). Neoliberal constraints on PHC have contributed to revitalization of indigenous medicine among poor, rural people. Health workers, however, often view indigenous medicine as ineffective and primitive. This thesis shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate between biomedicine and local knowledge of medicinal plants to create a pluralistic healthscape. Villagers access a clinic that seeks to provide low cost health care through community participation for the poor and marginalized. While clinic workers foster cultural sensitivity when treating their patients, villagers favour indigenous medicine over modern pharmaceuticals. Villagers’ discourses concerning health care choices offer insights into social and cultural processes beyond the medical. They tell us about the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and how they wish to subvert power that western medicine has over them.